Caste no bar

Dalit
literature has emerged as a powerful force against the exploitation of lower
castes in India. But the revolutionary transformation that it seeks to enact
can only occur through a plurality of voices, engaged in meaningful dialogue.

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Forced evictions of Delhi’s Dalit community, 2012. Demotix/Andy Ash. All rights reserved.“One
need not have been Caesar, to understand Caesar”, sociologist Max Weber categorically
stated, when he defined the foundations of sociology. The implications of such a statement are manifold, for it attempts to
blur the boundaries between the known and unknown. Literature, in particular,
constantly grapples with problems that arise when a writer tackles issues that
are beyond the scope of his or her experience. Protests are mounted when white
authors create black characters or when non-Dalits write about Dalits. But if
language is not permitted to transcend the barriers of race, caste and gender, then
how can dialogue prevail? What is to be done, if it is indeed impossible to be
Caesar?

Dalit literature has emerged as a powerful voice against the exploitation
of lower castes in India. It was first defined as “the literature written
by the Dalits and that written by others about the Dalits in Marathi” by Annabhau Sathe in 1958. This was redefined
in 2004 by Sharankumar Limbale to “writing about Dalits by Dalit writers with a
Dalit consciousness”. The introduction of the term ‘Dalit consciousness’ has
led to a general body of opinion pertaining to what constitutes Dalit
literature and more importantly, what does not. There now exists a view that
non-Dalit writers cannot and should not write about Dalits. In March 2014,
Arundhati Roy wrote an introduction, The
Doctor and the Saint, to an annotated edition of B.R. Ambedkar’s epic Annihilation of Caste, published by the
anti-caste press Navayana. Her piece created a furore in the Dalit community. Dalit
intellectuals were enraged,
“not because of any error or deficiency, but merely because she was not a Dalit”.

A clamour of voices

The reaction
to Roy’s piece is not an exception but the norm. Mulk Raj Anand, who wrote Untouchable, and Sivasankara Pillai, who
penned Scavenger’s Son, both
upper-caste novelists, have also been criticised for their superficial prose,
alienating to the Dalit reader. Dalits claim
that non-Dalit writers not only lack the ability to accurately represent the
angst experienced by Dalits in their writings, but also miss the revolutionary
agenda behind Dalit literature. This belief directly revolves around the notion
of ‘Dalit consciousness’, which needs to be examined in non-Dalit writings.

Mulk Raj Anand published his debut novel, Untouchable, in 1935. Through vivid descriptions of
the caste-based injustices committed against a scavenger, Bakha, Anand brought the
gruesome reality of untouchability to the attention of a large audience, albeit
a largely English-speaking, upper-caste and possibly western one. Despite his
attempt to shed light on the predicament of the “lowest dregs of humanity”,
Anand has been criticised by Dalits for romanticising scavenging. When
describing Bakha’s job of cleaning the latrines, Anand writes: “to him work was
a sort of intoxication which gave him a glowing health and plenty of easy
sleep”. Having written the first draft of his novel, Anand visited Gandhi at
his ashram in Sabarmati. Through cleaning latrines himself, he realised that he
could portray the act in his novel to appear “no better and no worse than any
other work”. Anand failed to realise that in his experience of cleaning the
latrines, there existed an element of choice. It is the freedom of choice that
differentiates a ‘lived experience’ from a vicarious one. An untouchable’s
existence is marked by forced labour conditions, and it is here that Anand’s
fiction falls short by glorifying such work.

Apart from the lack of authenticity, Anand’s Bakha also suffers from
one-dimensionality. The sympathetic portrayal of Bakha, wherein he is passive
and resigned to accepting abuse at the hands of upper-castes is indicative of a
superficial and external understanding of the emotional capacities of an untouchable.
Bakha’s helpless silence upon being slapped by an upper-caste man is in direct
contrast with the revolutionary sentiments that leap out from the works of Dalit
writers. Dalit writers do not see Dalits as incapacitated victims of oppression
– they see them as strong and able participants in a movement against a
historical injustice. Dalit poetry best exemplifies this intensity of revolt.
Annabhau Sathe’s poem, Take a Hammer to
Change the World, is a violent call to the Dalits for unity, who he considers
“jewels” against the priests and upper-castes. The aggression and anguish that
defines Dalit literature is completely lost in non-Dalit works.

“On a path
they struck for themselves

March the Dalits
in procession,

burning
torches in their hands,

sparks of
revolution in their eyes

exploding
like balls of fire.”

- from
Siddalingaiah, The Dalits are Coming

In 2010, the
upper-caste journalist Manu Joseph published his debut novel Serious Men, whose central protagonist
was a Dalit. Serious Men marked a
paradigm shift in Dalit representation. The protagonist, Ayyan Mani, was not
mute or helpless; but in fact scheming and devilish. Ayyan worked as a peon at a
research institute and hatched a plan to falsely pass his son off as a genius.
Joseph achieved something unprecedented, because his Dalit not only
orchestrated an entire conspiracy, but was also fearless and brazen enough to
cause a rampage against the narrow-minded upper-caste scientists who employed
him. In some sense, Ayyan is vindicated as the book concludes.

While such a
shift in Dalit representation must not go unnoticed, Joseph nevertheless
perpetuates certain stereotypes about Dalits.
Ayyan’s son is unintelligent and has to resort to illegal means in order
to ace exams. The furious Dalit crowd that attacks the institute upon learning
of the prejudices that the upper-caste scientists maintain is essentially a “marauding
mob”. That Dalits cannot compete on an intellectual level and must use might
or trickery as weapons are premises that must be seriously challenged by Dalits
and non-Dalits alike. Through his writing, Joseph reinforces and validates the contemporary
stereotype that Dalits are mindless, unruly and therefore uncivilised. By doing
so, he in fact reduces the Dalit revolution to a meaningless clamour of voices.

A common
history

Dalit activists at the Indian parliament, 2013. Demotix/Rajeev Singh. All rights reserved.These readings
of Untouchable and Serious Men suggest that lived
experience or the lack thereof deeply impacts the act of writing about Dalits.
When a Dalit experiences atrocities, he owns that experience. But does he or
she automatically become the author of that experience? Sundar Sarukkai further
reflects on this: “The Dalit who experiences oppression legitimately owns that
experience of oppression. However the experience of oppression also involves an
oppressor, either as an individual or a system, and the Dalit has no control or
ownership over this oppressor.”

Such a
concept of a lived experience necessitates the inclusion of an oppressor within
the narrative of oppression. This marks an important divergence from the
prevailing view that only a Dalit can understand and therefore write about his
or her condition by introducing a separate entity which forms an equal part of
the same condition. It follows therefore that an oppressor is entitled to an
equal ownership of the Dalit experience. However, whether ownership grants a
right to theorise about an experience has been a subject of interest even
outside the ambit of Dalit literature.

The Dalit
movement in India derives many of its themes and principles from the
anti-slavery revolution in America. American literature is splattered with
examples of white authors like Herman Melville, Harriet Stowe and Harper Lee,
who have crafted black characters. However, the 1960s saw the rise of the Black
Power movement, which recognised the exclusion of black voices in the American
narrative and criticised white authors like Stowe and Lee for creating and
perpetuating stereotypes about blacks. This led to a period when white authors
who might have wanted to write about blacks “stayed
home, playing it safe”.

Michael
Chabon’s 2012 Telegraph Avenue is one
of the few novels which are part of a recent phenomenon that Tanner Colby,
writing in Slate, sees as the “thawing of cultural ownership”. Chabon’s work, Colby
argues, does not stem from any white guilt, but from the “realization that the
story of race is their story, too”. Chabon agrees: “Being taught by black
teachers during black history month, surrounded by my black classmates, I
didn’t even question it...all of those people, they were my forebears, too.
That was my history. It was just American history”. If black history is
beginning to slowly merge with American history, it is perhaps time for the Dalit
movement to find itself within a larger Indian narrative.

The idea of
sharing a common history thus becomes important in the context of Dalit
literature. It has been established that the work of non-Dalit writers cannot
speak for the Dalits, which raises the question: what purpose does non-Dalit
writing serve? But it is perhaps worthwhile to reconsider the purpose of Dalit
literature itself. The literature that Dalits
call their own is meant to initiate a social revolution. If Dalit literature
represents a sociological viewpoint, then how can it possibly ignore the
existence, and more importantly, the perspective of the ‘other’? If Dalit
literature is a window that allows non-Dalits to access the Dalit ‘other’, then
non-Dalit writing can become a similar window for Dalits to understand the
otherwise inaccessible non-Dalit ‘other’.

Unravelling
the unknown

Dalit protests, New Delhi, 2013. Demotix/Louis Dowse. All rights reserved.When Mulk Raj
Anand wrote Untouchable, he had hoped
that he would come clean, after he “had been through the sewer”. Such a
confession is directly in line with Jurgen Habermas’ sentiments about the
Holocaust. Both believed that “rational
communication was potentially one way to stop such acts from happening”. Contemporary
non-Dalit writers like Manu Joseph and Aravind Adiga have certainly wriggled
out of the guilt chambers that confined their predecessors, but what has
survived is their attempt to communicate and engage with the other half of the
common caste experience. The resentment of Dalits towards these upper-caste
writers, although understandable, is hardly productive.

While it is
absolutely necessary to break the “Brahminical
stranglehold over cultural production”, an outright rejection of any non-Dalit writing will lead to
a mirroring of the aftermath of the Black Power movement in the United States.
Non-Dalits will stop writing about Dalits and subsequently stop engaging with
the issue of caste. The need of the hour is in fact the opposite. It is
necessary that the two historically separated and hostile groups, and therefore
their literature, engage and communicate with each other to the extent that
they deeply criticise each other. The Hegelian dialectic demands that the
thesis and antithesis coexist, so that a synthesis can emerge. The coexistence
of Dalit and non-Dalit literature is therefore absolutely imperative for the
issue of caste to be resolved.

Non-Dalit
writing serves a greater purpose than simply being a work of literature,
because its implications are far greater in the context of the anti-caste
movement in India. The fact that Joseph’s Ayyan is drastically more empowered
than Anand’s Bakha signifies that over a span of 76 years, the oppressors have
recognised a change in the voice of the oppressed, which is a positive sign.
Their attempt needs to be criticised and corrected, but firstly recognised.
Literature, after all, is an attempt to unravel the unknown. Chabon muses: “If I
can’t write from the point of view of a black woman nurse-midwife, then I can’t
write from anybody’s point of view. That’s why I do this. I use my imagination
to imagine myself living lives I don’t live and being people who I’m not.”

At the core
of non-Dalit writers crafting Dalit characters is a similar endeavour to
empathise and experience what they otherwise cannot do in their lived reality. The
power and onus of Dalit literature thus lies in not only obliterating the
stereotypes about Dalits through their own works, but also debating, arguing
and battling against the ones found in the works of non-Dalits. The battle that
the Dalits are fighting is a difficult one because their enemy must eventually
become their comrade. A transformation of this magnitude can only occur through
meaningful dialogue – one that literature has the potential to facilitate. One
needs to grant Caesar a chance to understand he who is not Caesar.

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